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2015 Goodreads Choice Awards

The winners of the 2015 Goodreads Choice Awards have been announced. Readers nominated 20,000 books overall, and more than 3 million votes were cast to select the top book in each of 20 categories. Here are results of genre interest.

Golden Son, from what I’ve heard, has considerable crossover appeal to YA readers — in fact, my local library shelved the first volume of the series in the YA section, the second in adult; go figure. Given the age & tastes that tend to dominate Goodreads, that gives it a boost. The same goes for V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic (which I gave my unfavorable opinion of here a while ago).

However my interest wanes when I see stuff such as:
“Pierce offers a Hollywood-ready story with plenty of action and thrills”
“RED RISING is what The Hunger Games should have been.”
“Incredible Sci-Fi Cross Between ‘Hunger Games’ And ‘Enders Game’ ”
“It has hints of Harry Potter and Hunger Games”

I read Red Rising. It was sort of Hunger Games-ish, and then it became murderous Harry Potter. It was okay, but not fantastic. It was good enough that I’ll probably pick up Golden Son, but I’m not rushing out to get it.

This is where you can see the correlation between the selling a lot of copies type of popularity and awards that Correia (at least) claimed to be looking for in the Hugos. I must say that it isn’t particularly inspiring.

Golden Son won by more than twice as many votes as second place Seveneves and I’d never heard of it! Has anyone here read it (Aaron’s description of the first book doesn’t motivate me to add to my Pile of Doom)? I agree that the blurb makes it sound very…derivative…and aimed at a younger demographic.

My estimation of A Darker Shade of Magic was that it was basically YA, only with a whole lot of violence. I would hypothesize, without having read Golden Son, that the reason this second volume of the series migrated from the YA shelves to adult was that the violence level increased, also. No doubt publishers’ marketing departments have an unofficial version of the MPAA formula by which a certain number of severed body parts raises the book a rating level.

I read Red Rising. It was sort of Hunger Games-ish, and then it became murderous Harry Potter. It was okay, but not fantastic. It was good enough that I’ll probably pick up Golden Son, but I’m not rushing out to get it.

Spot on. I have Golden Son on my ebook buy list but keep passing it by for other books.

Golden Sun has an entirely different feel from Red Rising, less YA and more intrigue and Space Rome. It reminded me of Ancillary in two ways: it’s version of Space Rome is far better informed by the current state of the research than the usual Gibbon, filtered through Cosmos, with lasers that is the usual way a Rome-inspired setting goes; and it does occasionally discuss the language of castes and the domination of an unequal society. That’s all of its resemblance to Ancillary though. A nugget-y nugget that addresses many of the topics some readers find too political, but not to the level of, say, some of Scalzi’s work.

It has a good plot that rattles along. It will probably get called “hard” science fiction by some idiots because it makes nods towards the size of the solar system… all while having a geologically active Mars and copies anti-gravity devices. But is does intrigue, it has some good fights, and some nice set pieces. I enjoyed it. I may get the next one. I would not ballot it.

I only read the first Odd Thomas book by Koontz. It reminded me how badly Koontz can occasionally write, so I’ve never read any of the sequels.

I have and it doesn’t get better. Each actually finds new ways of being impressively worse. Alfred Hitchcock’s ghost becomes a character. This is the last one of the series though so that probably helped it out.

@Bruce Arthurs: I only read Odd Thomas, too; I don’t remember much. Interesting concept, but I disliked the book a lot. I felt it wasn’t internally consistent (but I don’t remember why) and I vaguely recall feeling like Thomas was boring (or maybe that was just the whole book?). Oh and then there was gung jrveq ubhfr jvgu gur thl naq gur fcvevgf sylvat nebhaq be jungrire vg jnf (qrivy? qbbejnl gb uryy? jung jnf vg?), jvgu AB RKCYNANGVBA gung qvqa’g frrz gb svg va gur obbx ng nyy. Granted, this was the first of a series – but there was no indication of this at the time. So I read it as a stand-alone and was like “WTH?!” I also recall disliking the ending.

This was my first and (so far) only Koontz. I’m not a horror fan anyway, which a lot of his stuff seems to be, but he’s sooooo popular, I figure at some point I should try some non-horror SFF book of his (if he has any). But this book did not sell me on Koontz.

Red Rising and Golden Son were quite nice. I understand the comparison to Hunger Games. But I enjoyed Red and Golden much more. And … let’s say … I’m significantly older than 20. I leave the details to your interpretation.

I dont buy into that YA stuff. I mean.. come on, just because the protagonist is kinda young? There is a bunch of classics (not even scifi) that have much younger protagonists, yet are clearly not targeted at Young Adults.

I got a free ARC of “Red Rising” and it was firmly, nigh unto formulaically YA. Ticked all the boxes. Hunger Games, only Manly. Harry Potter, only with hand-to-hand combat. It got worse when it got into the ruling-class politicking, which it sounds like Golden Son is, so I didn’t rush right out to get the sequel. Teenage boys would probably like the first one, lots of swagger, bravado, testosterone. I’d read more if they were free to me like the first one was, but other than that, meh.

There’s definitely some SJW content about the oppressed underclasses in the books, so Puppies might hate ’em even with all the fun violence and Manliness.

I predict that other than the graphic novels and maybeSeveneves, these awards will have no overlap with the Hugos, and not much with the Nebulas. Certainly not from Filers. I don’t know enough about the Edgars and WFA’s to be so confident to predict those.

Kendall wrote: “[Koontz]’s sooooo popular, I figure at some point I should try some non-horror SFF book of his (if he has any)”.

I think you have to go all the way back to BEASTCHILD in Koontz’s early career to find some decent science fiction. But even back then, some of his other SF was pretty bad. In ANTI-MAN, the answer to “How do you kill God?” is “Pump him full of bullets and set him on fire.” And I forget which Koontz SF book featured a robot climbing a sheer cliff-face on the Moon… using suction cups.

(And iirc, his first novel, STAR QUEST, featured a star-travelling “Space Library” filled with actual books.)

Of what I think is his sole foray into sword-and-sorcery style fantasy, THE CRIMSON WITCH, all I remember of it is thinking as I read, “Wow, this is a clunker.”

(Let it also be said that, the couple of times I’ve met Koontz, he’s come across as a really nice guy.)

I rather liked Watchers. It’s the only Koontz book I own. It deals with genetic engineering, and has one of the best SF pets (Einstein, a supersmart golden retriever that belongs in the pet brackets if we do them) around.